Thanks for the speedy response. I tried that and followed the steps you outlined.

Photoshop still displays the same behaviour. That is, I can open an image but as soon as I select a tool from the toolbar to edit the image the program freezes. Even if I reboot and ONLY PS is running, it freezes.

We encounter a lot of similar issues, in Adobe Premiere Pro (and Elements) with its Titler. While PS is sensitive to issues with fonts (and not just corrupt ones), Titler is even more sensitive, and will crash that sub-application, that is launched from within Premiere, the "host application."

Having too many fonts installed, and active, can sap enough resources to crash a system, that is any way marginal.

I would look at a font-management program, and especially one that has a font-corruption utility.

On my workstation, I have 9000 - 10000 fonts, but seldom have more than about 250 - 350 "insalled" at any one time.

Glad that you found the cause and the fix. Though it's written for Photoshop, I have Arpit's first Adobe KB article linked in my Premiere Titler Crashing article, as it works well with that part of Premiere.